DDHS offers generous lunch options

Posted Oct. 19, 2021

By Huda Aden

News Reporter

After two years of schools being shut down, DDSD has finally reopened and has full-length school days. But how is the district preventing exposures during lunch? Covid exposure is still happening to this moment but having social distance and other areas to eat during lunch is helping slow down the spread of Covid. Students should continue to be given the choice on where to eat during lunch. They should still be able to choose between eating in the cafeteria, classrooms, gyms, or outside as long as students are kept socially distanced.

There are many students who attend DDHS. This strategy of giving kids an option of where to eat is a safe option and reduces the spread of covid.

“School food service department has experienced following food safety and nutrition guidelines,” the CDC states. “This makes strong candidates for serving as a Child and Adult Care Food Program Sponsor.”

Schools encourage students to eat more healthily as they provide fruits, vegetables, milk, and whole grains in the hope of an overall better diet. Eating breakfast at school is associated with better attendance rates, fewer missed school days, and better test scores. DDSD does a good job offering breakfast in the morning and free lunch where students are not charged. The school menu has a variety of choices, and bot cold and hot lunches are provided. Cold lunches usually have turkey sandwiches, salads, yogurt, bagels while the hot lunch offers teriyaki and orange chicken every day and another option, and they even change daily.

The kitchen staff are working hard to provide lunch for every student. Students are given 30 minutes to eat every day where food is provided in both North and South buildings.

“Schools are doing a lot to reduce the risk of transmission, including cohorting and masks, and physical distancing and ventilatio,” Education Week pointed out. “That’s great and these things really work well and I would agree that the weak link for educators, staffs, and students, is anything indoor where you have to take off your mask.”

Getting kids back into classrooms, and feeding them while they’re there, is a much higher priority.

“People talk about it as if the only risk we should be considering is transmission in the classroom when class is in session,” said Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at John Hopskin University Bloomberg School Of Public Health. “Not only lunch, but pick up and drop off time, all those other activities that occur around the school, those are also a piece of risk.”